The introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web (“Web”) has made a voluminous amount of information available to people having access to the Web. The Web has effectively made libraries virtual in the sense that physical volumes are no longer required to reside in a single physical location. At present, some 80+ million digital forms of publications have been tied to the Web, representing trillions of pages of information. While the amount of information which appears to be available through the Web is staggering, the reality is that the majority of research-quality information is completely inaccessible using conventional information search tools such as a general-purpose search engine.
Certain information is not available via the Web using conventional information search tools because such information may be residing on proprietary databases (or licensed information resources) which are not generally accessible via the Web. These proprietary databases (i.e., licensed information resources) are typically provided by commercial database providers and access to these proprietary databases (i.e., licensed information resources) is usually granted on a subscription basis. As a result, a person interested in obtaining information from these proprietary databases (i.e., licensed information resources) would have to subscribe to each database provider respectively.
Additionally, content in most publicly accessible Web databases, such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office's patent and trademark databases, are not directly accessible using conventional information search tools such as search engines from Yahoo! and Northern Light. That is, while a search engine may be able to identify and return a hyperlink or URL which corresponds to the website that contains a particular database, the search engine is not able to search for information within that particular database. Consequently, a person interested in obtaining information from such databases would have to go to the corresponding websites directly.
More significantly, database providers design their own proprietary databases using their own specific requirements and specifications. While a database typically handles access from the outside world through a database interface, such database interface varies amongst database providers. Therefore, a person interested in retrieving information from these various databases would have to access each database separately.
For example, a company, such as a law firm, may subscribe to a number of database providers in order to obtain access to different types of information. In order to provide convenient access for many individual users, access to the subscribed databases is typically provided on a company intranet via a number of clickable icons. Each icon generally represents a link which, upon activation, establishes access to a different database. As a result, a person would have to click on a corresponding icon each time access to a particular database is desired, even though the same search may be run on all the different databases.
Furthermore, even though some of the proprietary databases mentioned above also allow access from the Web via Web-enabled interfaces, each of these databases will still need to be accessed separately by a user. For example, typically, in order to access a proprietary database via the Web, a user needs to use his/her Web browser to connect to that database provider's website and then access the database via an interface. Subsequently, if the user wishes to access another proprietary database, the user then needs to leave the first database provider's website and then connect to the other database provider's website in order to access the other database. As a result, separate and sequential accesses are required if the user desires to access different databases. Therefore, it would be desirable to develop a method and system which is capable of providing efficient simultaneous access to multiple databases.